Laying out the winter sitting room

Laying out the Winter Sitting Room

Using one of the house's sitting rooms as an example, let's start by going through the very first stage of any room design - establishing the layout.

The First Stage

To understand a room, I will always first sketch it out to test out the possibilities. This room was previously a thoroughfare, so the challenge was to lay it out in a way that made it a room in its own right.

• Draw out the room; this doesn't need to be to scale. Include any architectural features such as stairs, pillars or fireplaces, as well as windows and doors. If it currently contains furniture, it can be helpful to sketch these out too to help you assess why the existing layout isn't working.

• Consider the way in which people currently move through the room and why this doesn't work. Think about how they ideally want to move around the room, and how you can encourage this.

• If you have drawn the existing furniture onto your plan, you can now remove these so you have a clean slate to work with.

• Play around with different placements of furniture. Keep in mind the proportions of your room, and how to play to its strengths. A long room could benefit from having larger pieces of furniture stacked down the centre, while a smaller room might work better if furniture is organised around the perimeter.

• When working on a room layout, I always like to think about 'crossing the street'; and by this I mean placing furniture in such a way that it encourages people to always take a different path through the room so that it never feels stale and can be seen in lots of different ways.

• Work out where you want your focal points to be. These are often the spaces you see from a doorway when you first walk into a room, or areas you will look at often - when you are sitting on a sofa perhaps.

• Once you have sketched out initial layout ideas, the next step is to create a more to-scale plan so that you know exactly what proportions of furniture you are looking for to make your vision a reality.

Your Assignment

Take a room - it could be one you're working on, or simply a room in your own house - and roughly sketch it out as I have. Consider how you might alter the layout to create a more appealing flow, perhaps applying my 'crossing the street' notion to make the most out of every corner.